Remaining Issues in Big Sur
I updated my main Mac to Big Sur a month and a half ago, so I’ve been using macOS 11.2.3 through 11.3.1. Unfortunately, I’m not sure that it fixes any of the Catalina issues that I mentioned, and it introduces a variety of new ones:
Several times my Mac froze and then became unbootable due to APFS snapshots not being pruned, so macOS ran out of disk space and couldn’t function (despite showing hundreds of GB of free space).
I continue to see random freezes and breakage across the system (sandbox file access, external drives, XPC, etc.), such that reboots are necessary to get it working again. I doubt I’ve ever had an uptime of more than 5 days, whereas prior to Catalina it was probably measured in weeks or months.
WebKit frequently crashes, seemingly due to a GPU issue, which it almost never did before. Same with the Quick Look process.
The most annoying bug, affecting me multiple times per day, is that save panels don’t work reliably. I will save a file (typically a message or attachment from Mail) and have it end up in the wrong folder. Part of this is because the state isn’t remembered. Multiple apps often default to the Documents folder rather than to the last used folder. But there are also glitches where the UI lies. The destination folder selected in the sidebar doesn’t match the destination folder shown in the pop-up menu above the file list. Or the pop-up menu says one folder name but the file list below it shows the contents of a different folder. Or the pop-up menu and file list both show the desired folder, but I click Save and it creates the file in a different folder (typically Documents rather than a folder in my iCloud Drive).
Save panels also no longer remember the sidebar width. So, unless I keep dragging it wider, I can’t read the longer folder names.
Save panels use rounded text fields for the filename and tags, whereas historically rounded fields have only been used for active fields like for searching and for posting in Messages.
I’m not sure whether the Mail data loss bug (moving messages stored on the mail server instead deletes them) from Catalina is fixed. I have multiple reports of it happening on macOS 11.2.3 (and reproduced it myself on earlier versions of macOS 11) but I haven’t received any reports of it on 11.3 yet. Perhaps most people who have seen the bug have either switched mail clients or are sticking with older versions of macOS. I’ve not heard from any users who were seeing the bug before that it’s fixed, nor has Apple said that it is. [Update (2021-05-28): I’ve received reports of this still happening on macOS 11.3.1 and 11.4.]
I continue to receive tons of reports of Mail rules not reliably moving messages across accounts (either from a server account to On My Mac or between mailboxes in different server accounts). Mail shows the “moved” message in both the source and destination mailboxes. Sometimes the message does actually get moved on the server (i.e. Mail’s display doesn’t match the reality of where the message is stored); other times the message really doesn’t move. Moving messages within the same account does seem to consistently work, if you’re not one of the people affected by the previous item.
The message list—I use the Column Layout—is massively slower, with occasional delays of several seconds when clicking a message to view and almost universal sluggishness arrow keying down the message list. It helps to a lot to uncheck “Highlight messages with color when not grouped,” which is a shame because I’ve always found that feature useful. I’m not sure what all the other causes of slowness are. Some of it seems to be due to repeatedly querying
NSUserDefaults(e.g. about the blocked messages settings) while drawing. But that doesn’t explain why some messages (inconsistently) get stuck for a few seconds before loading at all.Sometimes it’s not just slow; after clicking on a message it will continue showing “No Message Selected” no matter how long I wait.
Mail’s sort state is unreliable. Most obviously, the column that it’s sorting by is often not the one where it shows the indicator caret. So it looks like the sorting is incorrect even though it isn’t. But then other times it doesn’t remember the sort state for a mailbox, so it’s sorting by and indicating the wrong column.
Mail’s scroll state is also less reliable than before, e.g. when clicking on a mailbox it will show some random scroll position rather than either the last viewed one or scrolling all the way to the top or bottom.
Mail continues to have data vault problems that can prevent plug-ins from being able to load after a migration or restore. (Mail incorrectly reports that they are incompatible.) Usually this can be fixed by manually deleting the data vault (after turning off SIP), although sometimes even that doesn’t help.
Mail recipient auto-completion would only work when typing names, not addresses. This was annoying for contacts that have multiple addresses because there was no way to quickly jump to the one that you wanted. I think this got fixed in macOS 11.3.
After clicking on mailbox in Mail, it continues showing the content from the previously selected mailbox while it loads, instead of either waiting with the old mailbox selected or displaying the new one blank with a spinner.
Unread counts of mailboxes and especially smart mailboxes continue to be unreliable. Smart mailboxes sometimes show the wrong messages entirely.
The Mail search query is now maintained in the search field when switching mailboxes in the sidebar. This can be useful, e.g. when doing the same search across multiple locations, but it’s inconsistent with other apps.
Mail’s “Enable this account” checkbox doesn’t work for POP accounts. There’s no way to hide and disable them.
In Mail’s column layout, clicking the reply arrow icon next to message no longer shows the related messages.
Mail is encountering more mysterious errors that cause “Recovered Messages” mailboxes to be generated.
Moving IMAP mailboxes doesn’t work unless the target mailbox is collapsed. (It even fails if it’s collapsed but springs open as you hover for too long.)
Mail’s data density is much lower due to changing the way magic mailboxes work. It used to be that Inbox/Sent/Drafts/Archive/Trash mailboxes for all accounts could be grouped together at the top of the list. Most of the time you could work with a single combined/unified mailbox of each type, regardless of how many accounts you have. And then these other mailboxes wouldn’t clutter the rest of the sidebar. With Mail’s new system of favorite mailboxes, you can still see the magic mailboxes at the top, but they still appear (duplicated) in each account’s section. So, if you have 5 accounts, you lose 25 lines in your sidebar. Even on a 27-inch display, I can no longer see all my accounts at once without scrolling.
Using external drives continues to be unreliable, with some not mounting until I go into Disk Utility. Erasing drives often fails. It seems to work better to format as unencrypted HFS+ first, before formatting using the actual desired format. Drives spontaneously unmount, which hadn’t really happened to me for the last several releases.
There are weird scrolling issues in different apps. For example, OmniOutliner documents always open scrolled down a few lines. Messages conversations often open scrolled up a few lines (not correlated with which messages have been read or where the conversation was previously scrolled to).
Opening Messages by clicking a notification doesn’t always scroll the clicked-on message into view.
I really like the new window subtitle feature, but I don’t like putting the title and toolbar buttons on the same line. There just isn’t enough space for the buttons, especially if you like seeing them with labels.
I’m not yet used to the new coloring for active vs. inactive window title bars.
I miss being able to drag a window by its title bar while a sheet is up (e.g. while posting in MarsEdit, sampling in Activity Monitor, or sending a message in Mail).
I also miss being able to drag a window from any area of the title bar. Now I have to make sure I’m not clicking on a button.
Window sidebars are hard to read unless I adjust the accessibility settings.
Dimming the text and images in the sidebars of background windows is causing problems for me. First, this makes it harder to interact with background windows, e.g. finding the right folder to drop onto. Second, it’s inconsistent—sometimes a background window doesn’t get dimmed, which again makes it harder to tell which window is frontmost. As far as I know, there’s no API for apps to tell when to dim their sidebars, so (depending on the app) this can take extra work for developers and again there is inconsistency.
I continue to see window layer and drawing glitches, where a window’s chrome disappears, or everything but the shadow disappears, or a whole group of windows have their shadows flash on and off while I’m in another app. Sometimes the Dock itself flashes on and off.
There are drawing glitches like large red rectangles when viewing JPEGs or blue ones when viewing PDFs.
It’s no longer possible to drag a window right up to the menu bar or Dock. There is always a line of colored pixels in between, the desktop picture showing through.
Sometimes when I drag a window from a Retina display to a non-Retina one the font smoothing gets extra blurry.
Sometimes Night Shift only works on one of my displays (the internal).
Sometimes Notification Center doesn’t show any notifications.
Sometimes all the widgets disappear and I have to manually re-add and configure them.
The Stocks and Weather widgets are much worse.
Sometimes the menu bar clock is drawn faded out, even when Do Not Disturb is not enabled. Or, I’m not 100% sure, maybe Do Not Disturb is actually in effect even though it isn’t supposed to be, and it won’t actually turn off.
It’s forgetful of privacy preferences and sometimes spontaneously logs me out when I open the privacy section of System Preferences.
It still forgets my desktop pictures, but only for some spaces.
Sometimes switching to an app switches to the wrong space, i.e. a space that has no windows for that app at all.
Revealing files in Finder (either through another app’s menu command or the Command-click menu in a window’s title bar) often fails and instead opens a window showing just the home folder.
Finder shows files whose name ends with .mbox using a folder icon.
Finder sometimes reports a nonsensical error when I try to move a file to iCloud Drive. It doesn’t seem to be a problem with iCloud, since I can AirDrop the file to another Mac or to my iPhone and use that to save it to iCloud Drive.
Finder often shows a multi-second Gatekeeper progress bar when opening a regular document, even one that had been created on my own Mac and was never downloaded from the Internet.
Finder sometimes shows very stale folder contents, e.g. showing files in their previous folder long after they’ve been moved. Or not showing new files long after they’ve finished being saved. Or showing Safari download progress files long after the download has completed.
Other times the entire contents of a folder disappear for 30 seconds or so, making it look like my files have been deleted even though they were not actually touched.
Sometimes dragging a selection of multiple files doesn’t do anything. They have to be dragged individually.
Dragging and dropping files into the Time Machine exclusions list doesn’t work. (Workaround: click the + button and drag into the open panel.)
The Documents folder now shows some folders that are actually stored in app sandbox containers. I’m used to this folder being my area to organize.
Image Capture forgets the destination folder for saving photos. I have to choose it again each time.
Image Capture won’t auto-delete photos after copying them. (The “Delete after import” checkbox has been removed from the sidebar but is still available if you add the “…” button to the toolbar. It just doesn’t seem to do anything. Note that there is no View menu command to customize the toolbar; you have to know to Control-click on it.)
I like the new translation feature in Safari, but it turns out that I usually want to translate text that’s on the clipboard, not on a Web page. Why is there no Translate app like on iOS? Wasn’t Catalyst supposed to help with cases like this?
If I cut the URL in Safari’s location bar and then switch to another tab, the field remains blank. To see the URL for the new tab I have to reload the page.
AppleScript doesn’t properly work with Rosetta.
There are various problems with the Bluetooth APIs: connections time out instead of succeeding and connection observers aren’t always notified.
It’s now possible to remove the Spotlight menu, but I don’t see a way to get it back. [Update (2021-05-24): It’s in the redesigned Dock & Menu Bar preferences. I do like being able to hide Spotlight, since I use LaunchBar.]
See also: Big Sur 11.3 bug tracker, Multiple Issues including Kernel Panics.
Previously:
- Big Sur Really Needs Real Free Space
- Remaining Issues New in Catalina
- 2020 Six Colors Apple Report Card
- Waiting to Update to Big Sur
- More Big Sur UI Refinements
- Big Sur’s Narrow Alerts
- Mail Data Loss in macOS 10.15
- Some Known Bugs in macOS 10.12.6
Update (2021-05-24): Josh Centers:
Photos just straight up corrupted a photo in iCloud the other day. That corruption synced between devices. Thankfully I was able to restore it, but geez.
Update (2021-05-25): Rui Carmo:
I’ve only experienced some of these issues, but the interesting bit is that I have heard about most of them through complaints from my friends, so it seems pretty comprehensive.
I do have to wonder why this is still the case this far into the 11.x cycle, since Big Sur really ought to be a lot less buggy than Catalina.
See also: Hacker News, Twitter.
Update (2021-06-02): Jesse Squires:
This is the longest I have ever waited to upgrade macOS. It feels weird, considering WWDC is next week where we will see what is next for macOS. Big Sur still feels new to me, and announcing the next major release already feels too soon. I was avoiding Big Sur based on various reports about bugs and instability. There were not any ‘killer’ features I was eager to have, thus the main reason I upgraded was because Xcode 12.5 required it.
[…]
Michael Tsai and Howard Oakley have diligently documented all sorts of issues with Big Sur. I have experienced many of them. Most bugs are small, or they are “fixed” temporarily with a reboot. The last six or so years of macOS have felt like “death by 1,000 cuts” — I would love to see that change next week at WWDC.
[…]
Speaking of trash — Mac Catalyst apps. They are just terrible.
40 Comments RSS · Twitter
I don't know what you do with your Mac, but for another bit of anecdotal evidence, I don't experience nearly the bugs you do. I only reboot for software updates, I've got Time Machine, SuperDuper!, and Arq running backups, DEVONthink and Pastebot, Xcode, Docker, etc…
The biggest Big Sur issue I have is Safari sometimes beachballs for 2-3 seconds when opening a tab. That's very annoying, but doesn't seem like much compared to the list above. Probably an issue in one of the extensions I've got.
@Martin, Whoa, whoa! And then what? Bring Forstall back? :) Unfortunately that's not possible without Apple posting significant loses. And even then I doubt it will happen - they will just double down on "services" revenue.
Issues I have experienced with macOS Big Sur (M1 MacBook Pro 16GB/1TB) are mostly performance related:
- WindowServer constantly at 50% CPU usage (disabled all transparency and motion effects, using simple wallpaper, the only time it sits around 4% is if literally nothing is open and the Mac is not in use)
- WindowServer consistently uses 7GB RAM (currently have Safari with Ghostery content blocker, Terminal, TextEdit, Messages open, is that too much for M1 or Big Sur?)
- Typing in Safari forms (like this) and TextEdit has a ~0.5 second delay for each character typed, feels like typing into a dialup BBS
- Pulling down and navigating menus in Safari is sluggish
- kernel_task writes ~120GB to SSD per day, smartctl shows 51.1 TB of writes to the disk since purchase.
- Switching between TextEdit and anything (or vice versa) causes an inexplicable multiple second delay
- Many High Contrast UI elements are broken
- Finder does not update file/directory contents in a timely manner, sometimes several minutes. If I need quick access to a newly saved or modified file I close and re-open the same folder and it usually appears after a moment.
The performance stuff starts right away on a fresh reboot, and have always existed on this Mac.
A colleague suggested that many of my performance issues could be caused by macOS Big Sur phoning home with trustd to do anything, and because my local ISP maxes out about 24mbps (but is more like 3mbps in usage) that everything is slow. I haven't tried blocking trustd yet, mostly because I am not sure the broader consequences of that are worth it.
Overall, macOS Big Sur kind of reminds me of Mac OS X 10.0, if anyone else remembers that first release, which was basically an incredibly slow public beta with a very garish UI that was nearly unusable until 10.1 came along.
I see a lot of people raving about the m1 Mac performance, but mine feels about as fast as a 2018 MacBook Air that it replaced. The old trusty 2015 MacBook Pro is much quicker (running Mojave) with a fraction the resource use.
Anyway, I'm certainly not impressed by any of this performance. I don't know if it's entirely Big Sur, but what a resource hog either way.
>It’s now possible to remove the Spotlight menu, but I don’t see a way to get it back.
This is arguably one of the things that's nicer about Big Sur: this kind of stuff is now all under System Preferences, Dock & Menu Bar (in this case, Spotlight, Show in Menu Bar).
@Sören Forgot about that, thanks. I do think it’s odd that it’s only there, whereas e.g. the Siri, Time Machine, and some other icons are also available from their respective panes of System Preferences.
@ Michael: yeah. Seems they've removed the setting from e.g. Date & Time, but some panes still have the checkbox.
Wow, I don't have almost any of these. Possibly of note, I have a 2015 27" iMac, and stayed on Mojave until 11.2, I never installed Catalina or first Big Sur. I suspect that's the cause of most woes, burn your system to the ground and reinstall Big Sur and it may work better?
WindowServer goes crazy sometimes; not just when I wave the mouse around which comically brings it over 100%, but even apparently doing nothing it'll take off and the fans will start up. Closing a window somewhere usually fixes it?
Safari likewise goes from normal 100% CPU, often in a background window.
The audio switcher thinking media playing in Mastodon has higher priority than iTunes for using media control buttons is INFURIATING. I shout profanities that'd make a normal person sterile and then have to use the mouse. To control media. So mad.
Finder is sometimes as much as 10 seconds behind reality on rapidly-changing contents. Mostly it's OK. Save dialogs have never gone anywhere but where they say, but it's still obnoxious 20 years after 10.0 that the default in most apps is last-used folder, not the folder containing my document.
Spotlight indexing is terrible, verging on broken. I'm about ready to reset it and start it indexing again, because half the time it shows no results, the other half it gives wrong results. My screwing around with external drives may be partially or wholly responsible for this.
Notification clear is harder to hit and I can't tell I have old notifications sitting in there unless I click on it.
Nothing has crashed at all. Mail is worse-designed, but I don't see any technical problems.
According to Apple the Rosetta bugs in AppleScript should be fixed in 11.4.
Something is seriously broken on your computer. While I hate BS like every other developer I don't have as many problems as you do.
Holy Moly!!!,
I have the random freeze, but I've had it for a couple of releases (3-4 back) and still on Catalina. I have no idea why, but its something with the OS or something I installed, because it still happens with my new iMac. If you ever figure it out let me know.
my two topics with mail.app
- very often the "remove attachment" command is greyed out, I never found a reason why for some emails it isn't available - this bug is at least since macOS 10.14
- mail.app has since macOS 10.15 a nice new feature - it learns and after a while it suggests a subfolder for moving a selected email. basically it works but it can't adapt to new situations. I have e.g. a subfolder 2020, where I moved all backup-status-emails in 2020. now for 2021 I created a 2021 subfolder and still after almost 5 month mail.app always suggest the 2020 folder, although I manually moved 5.000 emails to the 2021 folder manually
some of your detailed problems I have too, but after swiching from a intel macbook late 2013 with big sur to a macbook pro 13" m1 most problems I had vanished - I think because I made a clean setup, I only copied the documents from my timemachine-backup, I didn't used the migration assistant. I think that's the number one reason to have a solid macOS - don't use migration assistant and make a clean install with every second big macOS release
Most significant, for me, is that PDF Services no longer work. You could write a shell or python script to process a PDF, and access it from the print dialog's PDF button.
But now, the scripts are sandboxed so much that they can't read or write files, making them useless.
I've definitely had more multi-second freezes in recent releases; probably vastly more since Catalina.
This one:
> when I drag a window from a Retina display to a non-Retina one the font smoothing gets extra blurry.
I see this in High Sierra (which is still my main Mac) as well.
Related to displays, a bug that seemed to appear in Catalina (possibly Mojave), probably also only relevant for mixed Retina + non-Retina: when available displays change (e.g. you connect one), windows sometimes get moved to the very edge of a display such that they are hard to grab and move back to a proper location. More rarely (haven't seen this in months), they get moved to an outright impossible location: you can still see in Mission Control that they exist, but they are assigned to coordinates within a display that the display doesn't have.
(It's possible that this later bug is related to sheets, and that, because sheets have been changed significantly in Big Sur, it effectively no longer happens.)
I’m really skeptical of this “you just need a clean setup” advice because I see many of the same issues on Macs where I’ve made a clean install for testing purposes.
My god. Is this really where we've come to with the Mac after all these years? When are the powers that be at Apple going to face the fact that they've created a bugs-on-top-of-bugs-on-top-of-bugs situation, and it's time to put the breaks on the yearly OS upgrade train and instead put all their energy into fixing bugs!?!?
To me, the biggest, most appalling bugs revolve around Finder. How can it be that we all see such common, reproducible things like outdated folder contents and blatantly inaccurate disk/folder content stats? It's totally unacceptable, and is anyone at Apple working on fixing it? It certainly doesn't appear to be the case...
@ Ben:
>But now, the scripts are sandboxed so much that they can't read or write files, making them useless.
Oof.
I looked into that and… can't figure out a way around it.
I wrapped a shell script in a bundle, code-signed it, had it assessed with Gatekeeper, gave it Full Disk Access (there doesn't seem to be a GUI way to give it just access to, say, my home dir), and and according to Console, TCC is even happy with the result — but regardless, if I then run this service from a Print dialog, writes seem to silently fail.
Plus one:
AirDrop window being unclickable from time to time, both device icons and the cancel button.
@Jonathan Safari beach balling has something to do with either Bookmarks or Cloudd. My guess is something to do with syncing Tabs and Bookmarks across devices. Super annoying.
@2cents Yes on WindowsServer usage.
And the most annoying problem, none of the recent release of macOS had any different to the way I work. i.e None of the new features make any difference. So apart from UI upgrade, the OS is essentially the same. But it has been getting more unstable with every release.
If most of these features aren't important. How about spend a release or two just doing bug fixing.
The one that drives me up the wall is Notification Centre hanging -- I don't get notifications, then I notice my fans are running high, so I click on the date and nothing happens, and I know I'm having this problem.
I open activity monitor and Notification Centre is hogging a CPU. I kill it, and everything goes back to normal. For a few hours, or days.
I'm told this only happens with external displays attached, but I haven't validated that.
Regarding Show in Finder just opening a home folder window: I was able to fix this by deleting Finder preferences (via `defaults delete com.apple.finder`) and then relaunching Finder (via Control-Option-click on Finder’s Dock icon).
I'm going to ask the same question I ask of everyone... you're using Big Sur why?
Thing A doesn't do things the way you want them done, or has problems doing them at all. Thing B does what you want in the way you want it done. But you insist on using Thing A.
Why?
Hasn't everyone learned by now to wait until the last release of a particular version of $MACOS before considering installing it? Yes, if you bought an M1, you're kinda stuck, but sheesh! Catalina has security updates for another year yet.
@Marc It’s hard to be a Mac/iOS developer on Catalina because the current version of Xcode requires Big Sur.
I can sympathize, but then it really should be development over >>> there, and the real world over >>> here. Considering the pain points in your list, it's time to get another box, put macOS on it, and call it the dev machine.
@Marc That’s what I did during the Big Sur beta and the first few releases. But it’s also extra work to keep things separate, and some things that I want to test and debug need a real system, not a clean dev machine. So eventually it’s just easier to upgrade the main Mac, and that helps with discovering more Big Sur–specific bugs in my apps, too.
@ Marc: IME, Big Sur is overall _less_ buggy than Catalina (we can quibble over whether that's saying much).
If the goal were to go to a more reliable release, it would probably have to be something even older like Mojave. And at that point, other concerns come into play. A few months from now, for example, Apple will probably stop offering security updates for it.
@Sören I did stay on Mojave for over two years for that reason. But I’ll have to disagree that Big Sur being less buggy than Catalina (as evidenced by the above list).
Speaking as someone who is still running Mojave on their primary computer, a 2018 Mac mini--because of 32-bit Steam games that can't run on Catalina, and also the giant scary-sounding bugs that I've heard so much about with it--and High Sierra on their second primary computer (cross-border situation with my husband), a 2009 Mac Pro flashed to believe it's a 2010 with an upgraded CPU and an Nvidia GPU, which I can't upgrade past 10.13 because Apple and Nvidia can't get their damn crap together so Nvidia can release drivers for their GPUs in Mojave or later...
I'm in the market for a new computer to replace the 2009 Mac Pro. And right now, I'm basically only considering a 2018/early 2020 Mac mini (the early 2020 speedbumped Intel version apparently still reports as a 2018) either completely downgraded to Mojave, or maybe running Catalina with a Mojave partition for playing Steam games, and an eGPU enclosure with an AMD GPU. Although right now it is literally impossible to buy an AMD GPU that isn't $2,000 on eBay, so I don't know when I'll be able to upgrade. Big Sur isn't even a thought right now because of all the problems reported with it. I don't have the need to run Xcode. Though it would be nice to run a more recent version of NetNewsWire, most software I use is still at feature parity on Mojave versus current versions, so I'm OK with it for now.
(That said, this bridgeOS bug in Mojave, where it crashes during sleep, is absolutely maddening. Trying to predict how I will find it in the morning--whether the mini will be asleep like I left it, awake like it shouldn't be, or having crashed and no screen output but without turning off the system (and very warm like it's doing something, despite not responding and having to force it to power down)--is like Russian roulette.
Michael,
I am stunned by your list of problems because . . . I have a few but nothing like your list. I have a 2017 27" iMac. It's been upgraded using Migration Assistant since at least Sierra. I haven't done serious development work on it since Mojave.
But still, it gets exercised . . . a lot—just an email and youtube viewer it ain't.
Are you *sure* it wouldn't be useful to build a seriously sterilized system from scratch?
Dave
The most frequent bugs I see are that Finder quits silently and I have to relaunch it, USB thumb drives disappear and I have to remove and reinsert them to use again, and spotlight results are awful now and default to items that I never use (“Bluetooth” will show “Bluetooth File Exchange”, which I have never ever used, instead of the Bluetooth system pref).
For what it's worth, none of my friends who have upgraded to Big Sur have reported any issues to me; nor have I had any trouble at all with Big Sur, which is running on two machines.
@Dave Fultz,
Call me old fashioned, but upgrades should not break things. If they do, they are downgrades. Michael should not spend his life rebuilding Macs because Apple did its job badly. It had one job: make the OS better. It failed. That means it's not testing its code correctly, and that's pathetic. Add fewer features, get them right.
@Dave Fultz I’m seeing most of these issues on multiple Macs including ones with fresh installations.
Well, I have a "new" one. Ever since I upgraded to Big Sur 11.4, kernel_task is almost constantly active throttling down my CPU. I've cleaned up the vents, started monitoring the temperature, and even with the fans at full blast and the CPU temperature in the low 60s it keeps throttling down my machine to the point of unusability.
I suspect lack of testing in older hardware (and a lousy choice of thermal curves), since my machine never behaved consistently like this even though it was already a bit sensitive to heat.
Someone _really_ ought to re-tune these things.
Well, I've now been fighting kernel_task stalls for two weeks, and video playback seems to stop working after a few hours. Full saga:
Circling back after a couple of weeks with some interesting findings:
I think I've narrowed down the cause for my daily stalls - Big Sur 11.4 apparently did something to my Wi-Fi card (perhaps a firmware upgrade) that causes kernel_task to stall and take up insane amounts of CPU load when trying to use my 5GHz network (which, by the way, was working before the update). Took me two weeks to figure out because I was on a wired connection, but the link above has the full troubleshooting saga and I'm leaving here a copy of the log lines that pop up in Console, for Google juice:
ARPT: 2859.550473: wlc_phy_rx_iq_est_acphy: SPINWAIT ERROR : IQ measurement timed out
ARPT: 2859.550487: wl0: fatal error, reinitializing, total count of reinit's[65], @'wlapi_wlc_fatal_error':701
Even if the Wi-Fi card suddenly developed a fault (unlikely), this is a serious incapacitating bug.
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